Purchasing Stockings: A 1950’s Memory

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What with Qaddafi slaughtering his people in Libya and workers up in (metaphorical) arms in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio, the world seems a chaotic place at the moment.  Today, for respite, I offer a poem that will take you to a quieter time–quieter, that is, if you remember your childhood as being a quieter time.  The poem is set in 1956 in the town of Washington, Iowa.  The store is Spurgeon’s, a dry goods store that is no longer on the square (although the square is still there).  Julia assures me that I am the man who shows up in the final stanza.

I promise to return you tomorrow to the chaos of the world.  For the time being, however, take a step out of time:

Beaded Curtain

By Julia Bates

At the age of five or six I go shopping with my mother for nylons

At a store where she worked before I was born
Wrapping gifts with tight corners and satin ribbons

She asks for a pair of stockings
The clerk
Slides open doors to wooden cabinets and takes out
Slim pastel boxes smelling of business and hand lotion

The woman slits the tape on a box and lifts the lid
The nylons lie in a whisper of paper

Folding the tissue back
The clerk slips her hand inside to show the fineness of the knit
The depth of the color
Her painted nails hushed through the mesh

My mother picks one pair or two
The tissue is smoothed the box closed
And taped again
Her new stockings put in a slim paper bag

When she finishes my mother tells me to look around
While she goes to the back room
Through a curtain of beads to a place
Where the clerks take their breaks

I wander the aisles
Eyes just high enough to see through small glass panes
Rows of spools of thread
Embroidered pillow cases
Socks

Women’s voices murmur and laugh from the back
So low I can’t hear the words
Just the sound of secrets

The first night I made love to a man
I dreamed myself back in that store
Buying stockings
I walk through the doorway of swinging beads

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